Category: Spirituality

I’m sitting in my home in the middle of Texas, on a “holy” day, thinking on the evils perpetrated in the name of a god that many in my country claim to follow. An idiotic madman wannabe dictator, with the assistance of a South African Nazi, is turning my country into a hellscape I no longer recognize, helped along by American Christianity. There are pictures of this madman being prayed over in the Oval Office by someone who claims the same faith of many I know.

Innocent citizens are being kidnapped in the street by law enforcement and sent to a concentration camp outside our borders. Medical research that would have saved lives is being defunded and halted. Lies on every topic spew forth from the cesspit of the capitol. Bombs rain down to murder brown people in countries beyond the sea. Unjust war is waged in Ukraine. Genocide is methodical in Palestine, again, in the name of a god many here claim to worship. Many I know would claim separation, but it is difficult for me to discern a difference.

I’m sick of it.

I haven’t said much publicly for several reasons: mostly, I am cowardly. I hide behind pacifism and a desire not to have the FBI (or whatever goons the government might start sending after those who criticize the would-be king) come to my house and disappear me. Also, I am afraid for my job, my livelihood, and my comfort being taken away. How pathetic of me. But when the aforementioned atrocities are being carried out every day in my country, or in my country’s name, or with its consent, how can I remain silent?

I don’t want to ruffle feathers, or have an argument, or engage with the people that support such evil under the lie that our president will save America by making it great again, whatever that even means. Therefore, I have said nothing and done little else. I don’t know what power my voice has. Many millions are already screaming in the streets against the injustice and evil that has risen, so what good will my voice do when added to the din?

I don’t know. But I no longer wish to be counted among those who remained silent while evil reigns. Here I am, speaking out. Maybe I will speak again in the future, I don’t know. I am still plenty fearful that I will face consequences for this little that I am saying. I don’t know who exactly reads this blog, or how they feel about things, or what they may wish to do to me for venturing to have an opinion, but brave little me is deciding on this “holy” day to not care.

If there ever was a Jesus, and if he were god, I wonder that he is allowing such utter black evil be done in his name, seemingly without his rage visiting retribution upon them. If he be risen, as many are joyfully proclaiming today of all days, where is he? Such things are beyond me, but I am done waiting for a god to reach down from heaven and right wrongs. It is up to us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other. That means, to me, not tolerating evil anywhere, fighting injustice everywhere, and loving all regardless of creed, color, gender, expression of love or any other petty “difference” that may be perceived between me and anyone else.

If anything I have said offends you, please, look beyond me to that which I am decrying. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is going on, and America is doing little to cover any of it up. Much of what I’ve said is public knowledge and public news. Look beyond your pearl-clutching of me, and see what evil is being done to those all around us. Please, stand with me, and speak out. Add your voice. Together, we are stronger and we will not be defeated.

In the end, I believe, as did Samwise the Brave, that this shadow is only a passing thing, and when the sun shines again it will shine all the clearer and stronger. But we must persevere, and endure, and fight back in all the ways we can to defeat the shadow and the evil beneath it. Hyperbole and ridiculous sentiment? Tell that to those languishing in prison for committing no crime. Tell that to those suffering. Tell that to the dead that should be breathing free today but for this evil.

May their memories rise again. May they be risen, indeed.

Browsing social media, as one does in this day and age, I came across a quote. It is unattributed:

“If you went back and fixed all the mistakes you ever made, you would erase yourself…”

The second part of the quote was added, and it said:

“…and that’s all I’ve ever needed to hear.”

I’ve been puzzling over this ever since. Initially, I want to agree. I want to consent that, yes, should I erase my mistakes, I as I know myself would cease to exist. Bound up with this is the assumption that as I am now, that who I am is a Good Thing. Well, I would like to mostly agree with that, too.

But, I find myself examining these premises a bit more deeply and questions arise: would I even want to fix my mistakes? Would that be desirable? Could one extract their mistakes from their successes and fix one while leaving the other unaltered? Are the two inextricably linked, in other words?

Am I anything without my mistakes, I wonder existentially? Without driving too far into the metaphorical weeds, the point is, I think, made.

Second, then, are the queries around whether or not who I am as I am is a Good Thing, warts and all. Are we, as humans, made by our failures? Do they, indeed, define us? The same could be said about successes. Are we who we are because we found success? Because we, at some point, did well? That infers that doing well is a good thing, and that doing poorly is a bad thing.

My society is tremendously invested in maximizing success and minimizing failure, as generally defined. The dearth of success is seen as lack of morality. Lack of backbone, of the Right Stuff. To not have success is, by definition, less than. To be successful is to be blessed, to be superior, to be on the Right Track. Do we exist in a black and white world, in which success is good and failure is bad? I reject that binary. The more I examine the life I continue to live I have come to the conclusion that life is capricious. The universe, as a whole, is uncaring about such small things such as success and failure.

Furthermore, success and failure are the same thing, given a long enough view. They are complementary sides of a two-faced coin, spinning in space, flipped, but never landing. One must have failure to have success, and success to have failure. Indeed, now we come to it: success and failure define each other. How do you know what success is unless you have failed? Without success, you don’t know what it is to achieve failure. Without the absence of light, luminosity has no meaning, in other metaphors.

Therefore, no, in answer to the many questions I posed earlier, I wouldn’t go back and erase the mistakes I made, thereby erasing myself as I am known. I know that I am who I am, and my mistakes/successes are but one fibre of my being, and are inextricably linked to each other.

Am I a person worthy of existing now as I am now? Yes, because my worth is not predicated on failure and success but on existence. I exist, therefore I am worthy. Whether I have succeeded or failed is irrelevant. As meaningless as those constructs are to place in opposition to each other, they are equally meaningless as a measure of worth, because worth is not about that at all.

Concluding the matter in mind is the conclusion of the quote: “and that’s all I needed to hear”. Not even close. I need to hear, and I need others to hear loudly and clearly, that success and failure do not make you who you are. They are but one facet of the multilayered being you are. They are not a measure of worth at all, that one should go back and erase one or the other. They are simply waypoints, signaling location, a way of saying “here I am” and nothing more.

A dear friend of mine shared a thing on social media, and without speaking to its factual veracity, I want to discuss the truth of the thing.

Some cultures believe we must be alive for a purpose: to work, to make money, etc. Some indigenous cultures believe we’re alive just as nature is alive: to be here, to be beautiful, and to be strange. We don’t need to achieve anything to be valid in our humanness.”

@ melatoninlau

My entire worldview, and my thoughts and feelings about it, are a construct. I’ve known this in other areas of my life, but I have not had the framing to understand my quest for meaning in this way: that my entire culture was predicated on my needing to be alive for a Reason. But that another culture held that I was alive simply to be Alive is a radical thought to me. Maybe I need to adjust my personal culture, my worldview, and my thoughts and feelings in the way that I consider myself.

Western, capitalistic society created me. From an early age, I understood that my value would come from what job I held, what I did for a living, and how I contributed to society. Those thoughts have eaten at my soul for decades now. As a tween, and teenager, I had no idea what I wanted to “do”. I didn’t know how I could contribute. Those thoughts worsened as I approached my eighteenth birthday and questions of what college to go to, and ultimately what to do with my life, became more pronounced.

I don’t know how to adequately convey the dread, the feeling of being lost, and of uncertainty that threatened to overwhelm me during my early years. It was a potent, ever-present layer of feelings. Maybe this is part of what sparked my descent into depression at this time; I don’t know for certain. I do know that I hated how I was feeling and had no idea what to do about it.

To get to today, I have survived much, and grown and matured, but if you’ve been reading my blog, you know I’ve been tortured over contributing to society, of finding meaning for my life, and knowing what I am to Do. Now, I may not need be conflicted about any of that! I don’t even need to Do anything at all!

I am “alive just as nature is alive.” I am connected to this planet, to humanity, and to the universe simply in existence. A plant, or a beaver, or a star does not worry about contribution. They simply grow and be green, or build a dam, or twinkle through the cosmos, and are Alive and are Enough. I am Alive; I grow; I have the ability to build; I am “star-stuff” as the great scientist Carl Sagan once said. I am Enough!

Just as I could not accurately convey the negativity surrounding my need to contribute, or what I would do in life, I cannot justly convey the positivity of how I am feeling now: the liberation, the joy, the weightlessness of being Alive and of that being Enough. I don’t have to take the best pictures, or create the best artwork, or have a meaningful job, or conform to Western culture at all in order to have worth. I have intrinsic value in Life Itself.

I don’t think I’ve even fully processed what this means in and to me. But I know that I will explore this idea fully, and adapt as much of this philosophy to myself that I can. Something this potent must needs transform me completely. What happens around me, or to me, or because of me is not what gives me meaning. Sure, I want to add to people’s lives; I want to preserve the life of this planet; I want to exist well – but that does not inform my worth. I am worthy! What I do is but an extension of who I am: a green thing, rooted deep, and nourished by the energy of all things.

This feels odd to say, but: I am going to begin a Bible study this coming Tuesday.

If you know nothing of mainstream Christianity, then a lot of what I am about to write may be incomprehensible to you. If, like me, you have always lived a life surrounded and inculcated with God, then what I am about to write may sound very familiar.

I’ve undergone such a journey in my life regarding faith, and religion, and God, and the Bible: I’ve walked away from it all several times and come back a few times. Being a Christian was and was not ever a choice I made. I was born into a Christian family, and a very conservative one at that. Prayers were offered, beliefs re-affirmed, a life was dedicated and re-dedicated to following precepts and “the way one should go” more than once.

I’ve styled myself an atheist, a Jesus-follower, a Christian, and other things. Thirty-five years into living, I don’t much do labels, or even explanations, anymore. Nothing quite seems to fit, define, or include how I feel and think and, yes, believe so I tend to eschew labels altogether.

This whole business of God, of religion, of Christianity is at once simple, and so very complex. It is familiar, and very, very strange. Frightening, and comforting. Growing up, I was taught the tenants of the faith, the evangelical Christian faith, at the same time as I was taught arithmetic, reading, and history. God was so inextricably intertwined with everything that I had no hope of separating anything mean from the Divine. As an older child, and young teenager, I knew all of the answers, the stories, and the Bible back to front and back again.

But cracks began to show, at the seams, the corners, and the low levels of my life. Depression became something that I struggled with, though I did not know what to call it then. Other mental health issues became prominent in my life, manifesting as anger, and behavioral troubles. I desperately didn’t want anything to do with God or religion, but it was such a part of my identity, of everything that I knew and believed about the world, I didn’t know how to let go of it.

Then my family became uber-Christians: missionaries. We left America to travel to another country, in this case: Papua New Guinea, to spread what we believed to the people who lived there. Ironically, it was there that my life of faith exploded. I met more of my peers than I ever had before, and people from many different Christian contexts, that I had my point of view radically altered. Many of my classmates and friends had conflicts similar, or even deeper, to mine. They had Questions about God that I had never encountered before. Or they had perspectives that I didn’t know could exist. Suddenly my answers seemed small and inadequate.

Whiplash. V, a jerk or jolt (to someone or something) suddenly, typically so as to cause injury.

I experienced whiplash to an overwhelming degree when I graduated from my missionary school in Papua New Guinea and returned home to the United States. I attended a very small, very sectarian, and ultra-conservative Bible institute. For two years I fought quite hard to maintain any semblance of a Christian faith at all. Again, I was immersed in conservative religion. I breathed it, ate it, lived it, but only at night when I dreamed was I free of it. The wide horizons I had marveled at a year prior in another land were challenged hourly and almost completely condemned by this place I found myself. I never before was on the outside of something religious, but only the senior administration’s convenience kept me from being kicked out during my second and final year there. My Questions had multiplied to a level beyond reckoning, and I didn’t know what to do.

Upon graduation, I joined my girlfriend who was studying at another university, this time a liberal arts school that was Christian in name and founding, but in persuasion was much more free than anything I had experienced prior, even more so than the high school in Papua New Guinea. There, while studying one of the languages of the Bible, ancient Hebrew, I met a man who would change my life irrevocably. I don’t remember his name, but he was the former campus pastor and current Hebrew scholar. While in his class, learning to read portions of Genesis and other parts of the Bible, he taught me to Live the Questions.

What he meant by that was to develop a life that was comfortable with uncertainty, with ambiguity, and with not knowing. The complete opposite of me as an early teenager who knew everything, me as a young adult knew nothing about the Bible or God. All my answers had evaporated in the past two years. Sure, I heard them often and loudly at the institute, but they rang hollow and empty now. I didn’t know where to turn. My life was un-anchored, adrift, and tossed. Living the Questions was a philosophy that became a safe harbor. Now I could ask questions prolifically, and be ok to not have answers.

If God is everything I was taught he is as a young child, then he should be big enough to handle a few questions from me. He shouldn’t condemn me for being uncertain, unbelieving, or, for the first time in my life, unafraid. I graduated three years later and almost completely gave up God, religion, and faith. Now, twelve years after that, I’ve yet to come back to where I was even in Papua New Guinea. I am still Living the Questions, and I have even more Questions than I ever did before. Answers are what are scarce. The Bible is at once more clear and much more opaque.

Life my professor before me, I want to model a life that Lives the Questions. I would like to introduce anyone who attends my study to this concept and way of looking at the Bible and the Christian world. I am not out to destroy faith, though certainly mine resembles not what I had before leaving my home as an elder teenager. I consider that a Very Good Thing, but not everyone in my life would agree. What I would like to do is introduce a life comfortable with not knowing, and to help dispel the fear that comes from being uncertain about ideas that one has been taught to be certain about. I lived in abject religious terror for seventeen or more years. No more is that true, and most of that is due to learning to Live the Questions.

I’ve taught Sunday School, attended numerous churches, graduated from two faith based colleges, and read the Bible more times than I can count. I have a passing knowledge of Ancient Hebrew, and am well versed in doctrine, tradition, and church history. I am certainly credentialed enough to lead a Bible study, though it remains to be seen if I am qualified. But, come Tuesday, I will once again be leading a Bible study and be back to all the old familiar places, though in a completely different light and way. I will always Live the Questions, and maybe I can teach a few other people how to do that as well.

UPDATE: the Bible study was canceled after just three meetings, two of which were attended only by myself, and the other by four people on purpose. It did not go as planned.

“What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” Luke 15, the Bible

“I’m the sheep that got lost, Madre.” – Creasy, Man on Fire

“Then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire, shut up in my bones; I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it.” Jeremiah 20:9, the Bible

Sometimes I hate being me. Specifically, I’m a writer. This is not something I chose, that I ever wanted to be, that I ever looked for in my life. I wanted to play baseball. But, I’d have been a writer anyway. I can’t help it. I went to school, I’ve developed and honed my skill at writing. But no matter what I cannot stop. Things burn in my brain, and wind their way round and round my cranium, shouting at me. I can’t quiet them, I can’t shut them up, and I can’t ignore them for long. They must be let out.

So I write.

I say this to apologize for what I am about to say. It isn’t completely fair or nice, but I can no longer hold it in. I do not claim to be right, or without blame, but this is what I cannot keep silent about.

Ever since a madman walked into a school and murdered children, I haven’t been quite right. I tried to make sense of a senseless act. What kind of person, disturbed or otherwise, misconstrues a threat out of something completely harmless? Even animals tend not to attack when they are not threatened, or in need. But madness happens.

And then, as always happens, the murdering psycho is endlessly discussed, and analyzed, and researched. And then, before that is finished, the debate turns, as it should, to us, the survivors, we who stood by, even if we were given no choice, and watched it happen. What could we have done? we ask ourselves. How could we have stopped this? we wonder. Why could we not save our children? These questions burn most intensely in the minds of those who lost their sons, their daughters, their sisters, their brothers, their friends. Even people like me, who live hundreds of miles away and will never meet anyone associated with this tragedy can’t help but ask the questions. After all, my niece attends school. My sister visits movie theaters. My mother walks down the street.

Finally, the discussion gets muted into something political. The rage and the sadness turns societal. We blame, we turn on each other, we shout, and everyone concocts their own foolproof plan and clamors for it to be heard. This is only natural. We want to do something. Every single moment of every single day, people die. Right now, as I type, people are dying. Why don’t I feel outrage, sadness, why don’t I call for something to be done?

First, I accept it as a natural part of life. The human condition: 100% fatal in every single verifiable case. Second, it isn’t being thrust into my face. Most days, I don’t see death. I don’t feel it. I live in the false comfort that it has slunk off into the night and won’t come back. Until it does.

Then I want to beat it back into the night.

All of this is completely natural.

In a way, we are all still dealing with our grief. Our personal grief, our social grief, our national grief, our human grief. Therefore, I don’t condemn. I don’t blame, and I don’t seek to pass judgment. A person in pain, a person in mourning is not accountable for the outpouring of grief. They can’t be. It isn’t like they can stop it. Emotion is real, emotion is overwhelming, and emotion is valid.

What comes after the emotion, the grief, and the time to mourn the dead is the part I want to address. No, the part that I can’t help but address. I wish I could stop typing, but it isn’t that easy. Be angry at me if you must.

I lost my faith. I once was a Christian, walking down the straight and narrow path towards heaven, following in the footsteps of Christ. That is no longer my reality. I don’t necessarily live or act any different than I did, but I am less certain about truths I once held dear. And that is my cross to bear, my own particular road to hell if I am wrong and my childhood was right and if it is about right and wrong and not about something else. So don’t make the mistake of believing that I don’t know what I am saying or that I didn’t once believe as you might right now.

One thing that I began to see, and read, and hear much of in the wake of our dear children’s death was shouting about gun control. I’ve heard it my whole life. Ever since Columbine. That doesn’t surprise or bother me. If someone gets bitten by a dog, it is the dog that suffers, regardless of any circumstance, though that is hardly a fair metaphor. But I don’t hold guns responsible for acts of violence done by them. A gun is just an object in space, without will or desire. A gun never can or will act on its own.

Humans act. All to often: using guns.

And in this debate, I hear people talking about banning guns. About keeping guns. About hammers, cars, baseball bats, and Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America.

I hear Christians shouting that we should be allowed to “keep and bear arms”. That I can no longer abide. It burns me up and sets my heart on fire. I weep, and I wail, and there is no one to listen.

WHY? Did not Jesus himself, in the face of angry mob which had gathered to murder him, say to the man defending him with a sword “whosoever lives by the sword shall die by the sword?” I have seen, my whole life, a country and a people that lives and dies by the sword. It is, without sarcasm or ridicule, the American Way. A cursory study of the history of America proves that we won our independence with guns, we shred our nation apart with guns, we lost millions in European wars by guns, we stopped Hitler with guns, we fought a pointless and for too long conflict in Vietnam because we could not put our guns aside, and not so very long ago a man with a gun ended the lives of innocent children. We are living and dying by the sword.

To anyone who names themself Christian, and yet calls for continued existence and ownership of guns: how can you? Are we not to live by faith, by love, peaceably with all men? Do you imagine that the only reason Christ refused to fight back in the garden was because he was destined to die? Do you think that if God Himself came to live among us for no particular reason at all, he would have fought for his life?

The cowardly and despicable National Rifle Association has said that “the only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun”. What utter folly. What sheer, willful stupidity. Have we forgotten Tiananmen Square? Have we forgotten that a man, a man whose name we do not even know, stopped a battalion of tanks with nothing but his body. Actually, his hands were full. But not of guns. Of shopping bags. A gun is far from the only thing that will stop a bad man. In fact, in most cases I know of, guns actually prove fairly ineffective at stopping bad things. Guns are nowhere near the best way to stop a bad man.

Love. Understanding. Respect. A determination to stop at nothing to avoid violence. These are the things that will stop bad men. I am not some hippy, nor a person who is naive. I know that not every madman can be reasoned with, can be hugged into inaction, or can be understood. But I do know that trying is the first, best thing.

By clamoring for your right to own a gun, to bear a gun, you are demonstrating a general refusal to believe an alternative exists. “My gun will protect me” is the most foolish lie I’ve ever heard someone believe. “My gun will make us safe” is an insidious lie I am sick of hearing. Our insistence on arming ourselves is what is killing us. Our guns are what are killing us. Guns were designed and ever intended to do one thing and one thing only: kill. Guns were not designed to kill animals. We were killing animals just fine. What we couldn’t do was penetrate armor. Animals don’t wear armor. People do. Wearing armor, generally, gives a person a better chance at surviving combat. A gun makes most armor ineffective. Guns were devised to kill people. That is their only reason for being created and existing.

Christian, how can you say that a gun is something you must be allowed to own, and bear? It may be American, but it is not Christian.

Jesus died to prove that death is the best final resort in the face of unreasonable violence. Love your enemy so completely that you let them kill you if they must.

I’m sorry. I no longer have the proper credentials to say this to many who call themselves Christians and expect to be heard. For the rest us who don’t identify with an ancient Jew, let me say that love is still the best option. You don’t have to believe the Bible to know that, because I know that, and there is much about the Bible I find hard to believe. I am not perfect, I do not have many facts, nor do I have a loud, persuasive voice.

But I do have a voice. And as an American, there is a First Amendment which gives me the right to use my voice. I chose to use my voice in place of a gun. I will always believe that a voice, a word, is the most powerful force in the universe. Does not even the Bible teach us the power of the Word of God? Words can be used to stop a madman from ever getting to the point of violence. Words can be used to stop armies from deploying for battle. Words can stop bad things from happening. And even if that is for one more moment, one more hour, one more day, is that not worth the salvation of blood? How cowardly must you be to weary of talking, of hearing another talk, so that you seek the most effective means of silencing their voice forever? Is not murder the ultimate violation of America’s First Amendment.

Also, seeing as how I am allowed to speak up, and I can’t keep quiet, though I wish desperately I could and avoid the inevitable arguments or counterpoints that may follow, I simply refuse to remain silent. To that end, you are certainly welcome to disagree. I am not hypocritical. You are allowed to speak. I am allowed to think you are wrong. Use your words. As God once said, “come now, let us reason together”.

Let us reason that an object which exists only to kill, unlike a baseball bat, is a bad thing, and the worst option for conflict resolution.

Right now, I feel pain every single time a person who claims to follow the Prince of Peace calls oh so loudly for a weapon of destruction to be theirs. This is part of why I lost my way. I couldn’t reconcile a lifestyle with what I knew to be true, or what an ancient book seemed to say in other parts of it that aren’t so nice. For all I know, Jesus was a rebel against God Himself, a God who calls ancient Israel’s King David, a mass butcherer, a man after his own heart. I didn’t know, I still don’t know, and so I stepped away to be true to what I did know. I lost my own way to better follow my conscience.

I’ve said what I had to say. I apologize it took so long. If you made it this far, thanks for listening.

Perhaps now I can rest. I so long for rest. And Peace.